This isn’t really new, but I just remembered to write a post about it. Ajax Animator for iPad got a relatively minor, but certainly pretty important update.

The new update incorporates the TouchScroll javascript library to have nice flick-to-scroll-ness throughout native iPad apps.

The VectorEditor core had a few bug fixes, rotation now works and so does resizing (though it’s still susceptible to the always-existent resizing of rotated objects awkwardness - I would love it for someone to fix it). However, resizing doesn’t change the size of the bounding box, which is a somewhat awkward aesthetic but it’s still functional.

Today I went to the magical Apple Store and tried out the iPad for the first time. I really have to say that it’s quite magical, though it doesn’t fulfill the criterion for Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law despite what Jonathan Ive says. Though I really haven’t tried any large area multitouch interface before (sadly), and I would expect it to be a somewhat similar if not exact replica of the experience. Keynote and Numbers were pretty neat (I suck at typing on the iPad in any orientation, so I don’t like Pages). That’s enough to show that iPad is not just a content consumption tool as the iPod and iPhone primarily are, but also content creation.

Anyway, in a few minutes I just swapped the mousedown, mousemove, mouseup events with touchstart, touchmove, touchend events respectively in the core of VectorEditor, while adding a new MobileSafari detection script (var mobilesafari = /AppleWebKit.*Mobile/.test(navigator.userAgent);) and in a quite analogous “magical” way, VectorEditor works in iPhone/iPod Touch and theoretically iPad, Just dragging the vectoreditor files over to the Ajax Animator folder and recompiling should bring iPad support to Ajax Animator with virtually no work.

I haven’t tested it. Downloading XCode 3.2.2 right now so hopefully I can test it soon. Stupid how it’s what? 2.31 gigabytes?!

And possibly, I could use PhoneGap to hack together a App Store app which does the same thing (and maybe charge for it, which might be a bit cruel as this application is open source and works equivalently online - but I guess that’s okay for those people who don’t read my blog >:) ). Maybe get enough to buy an iPad :P

Anyway, though I’m pretty late to this and my opinion probably doesn’t matter at all, here’s a mini iPad review: It’s really really cool, feels sort of heavy, really expensive, hard to type on in any orientation (interestingly it has that little linke on the f and j keys with the keyboard which feels useless since I always thought the point of that was so you can tactile-ily or haptically or tactically or whatever the right word is, find the home row, but since there’s no physical dimension to an iPad, it just strikes me as weird and wanting of that tactile keyboard). Otherwise, browsing really really feels great. Only thing I miss is the Macbook Pro style 3 finger forward/backward gestures (@AAPL plz add this before iPad2.0, and also, get iPhoneOS 4.0 to work on my iPhone 2g or at least @DevTeam plz hack 4.0 for the 2g!).

Oh, and for those lucky enough to have a magical iPad, the URL is http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/ipad/ at least until there’s enough testing to make sure that I didn’t screw up everything with my MobileSafari hacks.

Screenshot

Ubuntu’s weird and adding a bar on top of all my screenshots

http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/VectorEditor/stickfigure.html

I like stick figures, and browsing YouTube, I found some things on Pivot and Pencil (really awesome free desktop animation apps), and that made me think, Stick figures are awesome. So I’m going to add some better Stick Figure features into Ajax Animator and possibly upstream to VectorEditor eventually.

Eventually, what will happen is a pluggable editor system and swapping between the new Mini UI and the old standard UI. The pluggable editor system will enable switching between the existing VectorEditor and OnlyPaths editors as well as SVG-edit. Possibly, OnlyPaths will be phased out as SVG-edit supports every feature of the former as well as many more. The priority editors with the new version will be VectorEditor (the Mini UI editor, based on Raphael so it works fine cross-browser, but is also much more limiting than the rest, including OnlyPaths which it partially replaces). SVG-edit is an awesome project which is being actively developed, and will add new features that may make the Ajax Animator viable for more than just stick figures. New features that will come from the transition could include Gradients, Curved paths, Wireframes, Zoom, Groups, Align tools, Rotation and Resizing (without bugs!), Polygon/Polyline editing, to name a small subset. It’s likely that SVG-edit will have far more features by the time it’s fully implemented. It’ll be awesome.

The SVG-edit UI won’t fit well with the Mini UI (which I actually like more), so the classical UI will be revived.

I made a new minor update to vectoreditor which allows things to be resized, it’s not perfect, but works mostly.

So I don’t actually have wave yet, but for all 2 of you (likely less) who have used pygowave, an open source third party implementation of the wave protocol. So there was how I developed it, I read through the APIs and tested on pygowave. So what does VectorEditor do that svg-edit and… erm… svg-edit don’t do?

First, VectorEditor for wave is really really real time. Waaay more real time than svg-edit (not really). But VectorEdit (VectorWave might be a nice name.. I’m going to try using that name from now on in this post) transmits the data such as even while the shape is still being drawn, rotated, or moved (rotation needs work). Another nice feature is that the transitions are animated so things are even more seamless.

Another important feature is shape locking. So when someone selects a shape, it gets locked and can’t be edited by anyone else. If anyone tries, an alert box appears saying “Shape shape:5sdfwef98dfe3ssdf is locked by user antimatter15@pygowave.p2k-network.org”. svg-edit (the latter) doesn’t support moving things after they’re created so it doesn’t really matter then, and I’m quite certain the former doesn’t do any type of locking.

And lets not forget the likely most important, yet totally untested feature that seperates VectorEditor from the rest: IE support, which is inherent since it uses Raphael for rendering, but it may not be necessary since google may be making some shim-type system of hacking svg awesomeness onto IE and making the whole VectorEditor project useless.

So if you want to try it out, go to pygowave, sign up, create a wave and add the

Edit: This post is mostly crap. I figured out how to solve my problems while writing this. But I’m posting it anyway because I feel obligated to spam the internet with my outdated thoughts

One of the main features of Google Wave is the ability to do live concurrent realtime editing. Sadly, this functionality isn’t easy or as far as I know even possible on Google Wave. Most of the time it doesn’t matter. The only time it would matter is if you are using live concurrent text editing within the gadget. Of course, that’s what I tried doing and that’s why i’m writing this blog post. So I still haven’t gotten my Google Wave Invite yet (hope soon!) so I’m experimenting with the pygowave project, which is a third party open source implementation of the Wave Protocol. The interface is missing something that is quite important to wave: multi-user text editing. So I decided to try implementing it as a Wave Gadget.

I really did understimate it’s complexity. While implementing isn’t usually too hard, the structure of the Wave Gadget API makes it more difficult than it could/should be. What the wave gadget API does is it has a real time updating key-value table. It’s quite flexible and useable most of the time, but for real time editing, not quite as useful as when something is changed.

For instance, if 2 people are editing the same thing, then whoever submits the data last is the one which wrote the data and the first person’s edits are ignored. Very rarely do 2 people need to edit the exact same thing. But when they do, it’s not easy to merge the things. A more chat-like system could work.

But while implementing that chat-type system on top of Wave is possible, it feels very inefficent, partly due to everything being cached at all states (to support Playback) and worry about something akin to garbage collection to delete things after everyone has patched their running copy.

So yesterday, I worked a little on making a VectorEditor based Ajax Animator. It actually took suprisingly little work. The mostly modular and abstracted design of the Ajax Animator means that only a few files need to be changed. Mainly those in the js/drawing directory. Though there was a bunch of references to Ax.canvas.renderer.removeAll() which needed to be changed.

Another cool feature in that version is the ability to have layers show up concurrently. So you can see things while drawing just as they would be in export.

However, it’s not ready, it’s very very buggy, Lines and Paths aren’t tweenable yet, and it’s missing all those nice features of OnlyPaths that VectorEditor inherently lacks.

But the one really nice feature I think is the multi select. You can easily select a group of things which comprise some sort of shape, and move it all across.